Lucifer7, January 2008
Contents
New on Katinka Hesselink Net
Found Online
Short Quotes
Editorial
The Secret Doctrine
St. Paul's Alleged False Metaphor
The Sweetness of Now
New on Katinka Hesselink Net
In the November issue there was unfortunately a link that pointed to the wrong page. Here is the correct link: G. de Purucker on In
times of crisis (about World War II)
Found
Online
The
Dalai Lama wants to put it to the vote: Do his people want him to
reincarnate? I have a hard time not smiling because if his people say
'yes', he says he is considering appointing his reincarnation when he
is still alive. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2955350.ece
Short
Quotes
Talbot Mundy, Queen Cleopatra
"Now because there is a law of opposites it must appear that
there are two ways of arriving at a given goal. The one is violent, the
other not; and each way has a multitude of bypaths that may lead into
inertia, but
none of which connects the way of bloodshed with the way of peace. For
they
are separate, although their courses appear parallel; but that is only
an
appearance. One way leads toward the true goal, peace and patience
begetting
patience and peace, albeit often after many perils narrowly avoided.
But
he who travels by that other way sees nothing but a false goal that
recedes
as he advances, every act of violence inevitably giving impulse to
another
of its kind."
James Morgan Pryse, from
The Canadian Theosophist, March 15th, 1926
"The
spiritual truths of the past are identically the spiritual truths of
the present and the future. Time cannot swallow that which is
eternal."
Buddha, Dhammapada, Translation Juan
Mascaro
141 Neither nakedness, nor entangled hair,
nor uncleanliness, nor fasting, nor sleeping on the ground, nor
covering the body with ashes, nor ever-squatting, can purify a man who
is not pure from doubts and desires.
142 But although a man
may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good,
self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any
living being, he is a holy Brahmin, a hermit of seclusion, a monk
called Bhikkhu.
Paul Brunton, The Inner Reality, Chapter VI
Heaven can be entered after death only if we have already
entered it while
alive. This is the value of life in the flesh; there is no other
worthwhile
value that I know.
Editorial
Friends
and foes! Criticism is the sole salvation for intellectual salvation.
It is the beneficent goad which stimulates to life and action-hence to
healthy changes-the heavy ruminants called Routine and Prejudice. In
private as in social life, adverse opinions are like conflicting winds
which brush from the quiet surface of a lake the green scum that tends
to settle upon still waters.
H.P.
Blavatsky, Literary Jottings, CW XIII page 243.
In this year when the USA will perhaps vote a woman or a black man
to be its president (I do so hope for a Democratic president) - I wish
you all a happy and healthy 2008!
Katinka Hesselink
The Secret Doctrine
Alex Wayman, Canadian Theosophist, Volume 27, #8 (1946)
"On close observation, you will find that it was never the
intention of the Occultists really to conceal what they had been
writing from the earnest determined students, but rather to lock up
their information for safety-sake, in a secure safe-box, the key to
which is - intuition. The degree
of diligence and zeal with which the hidden meaning is sought by the
student, is generally the test - how far he is entitled to the
possession of the
so buried treasure." (Mahatma Letters)
"Indeed it
must be remembered that all these Stanzas appeal to the inner faculties
rather than to the ordinary comprehension of the physical
brain." (Proem to The Secret Doctrine)
So
it is apparent that The Secret Doctrine is difficult, not because
H.P.B. was individually obscure, but because it is not possible to
present Theosophy in a language which "all who run may read."
St. Paul's
Alleged False Metaphor
St. Paul cannot
too often be defended against the reproach cast upon him fifty years
ago by Dr. Goldwin Smith, touching the argument about the seed sown in
the ground that it must die before the new life can appear. The
Church would rather let St. Paul suffer in literary reputation as the
author
of I Corinthians than sacrifice their dogma. St. Paul was too well
versed
in rhetoric to go before the clever scholars of Corinth with a false
metaphor
and he did not do so. Goldwin Smith did not bring his knowledge of
Greek
to bear upon the passage, but accepted the interpretation of the Church
that
the corpse, already dead, was the seed sown in the earth that would
spring
to life again. The Church has made a graveyard discourse of this
chapter,
which St. Paul could not possibly have intended as verse 50 makes
evident.
As a graveyard exhortation to those who blindly believe in the
resurrection
of the physical body, could a more bitter mockery be conceived than the
closing verses: "O grave where is thy victory, O death where is thy
sting?"
What a difference when the chapter is read
as St. Paul intended it to
be: a paean of jubilant life and birth, of life more abundantly, of
birth
and rebirth on the physical earth, of birth in the psychic world, of
birth
in the noetic or spiritual world. All this is concealed from the
English-speaking reader by mistranslation of important words and the
apparent transposition of one or two verses. One Greek word
in particular appears to have
gained the enmity of the theologians. It is the word psuche, or psyche
in
English, the butterfly, applied by the Greeks to the human soul, which
flits
and flutters from flower to flower of the desires of life, so that a
man
changes from hour to hour, from day to day and from year to year, so
that
he is never the same at one period of life that he was at another.
Jesus
and Paul both use the word to represent the human soul or personality,
but
the translators do their utmost to conceal or camouflage this fact,
because
"saving the soul" is the great mission of the evangelical preacher,
though
Jesus taught that he who would seek to save his soul would lose it, the
changeable
personality having to be abandoned so that the stable spiritual Self,
the
ever present Christ principle, available to every man, may become the
basic
reality of his existence. The translators make Jesus say that
"he who
would seek to save his life shall lose it," which is nonsense. (See
Luke
ix. 24, and kindred passages for the substitution of life for
soul.)
A similar deception as found in the writings of St. Paul. Verse 44 of
this
15 chapter of I Corinthians may be studied as the basis of Goldwin
Smith's
charge of false metaphor. The Authorized Version reads: "It
is sown
a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a
natural body,
and there is a spiritual body." The word "Natural" should be
"psychic,"
and is so rendered in the margin of the Revised Versions of 1881-1886.
"Natural" conveys to people generally the meaning of common or
ordinary, so that the corpse is understood to be meant as what is
"sown" in the burial of a dead body. This is an entire misconception of
Paul's teaching. Burial in a grave of a dead body was not in his mind
at all. What he speaks of is the psychic body, sown at birth in a
physical body, to be raised in its reincarnation or resurrection, the
conditions mentioned duly applying to the psychic body which the
experiences of the disciple must change it into a more glorious
spiritual body or if he fails try again in another incarnation. These
conditions obviously do not apply to a body of flesh and blood as verse
50 makes plain. It, that is, the psychic body, is sown in corruption:
it is raised in incorruption: it is sown in dishonor (how can this
apply to the mortal bodies of our beloved ones?): it is raised in
glory: it is sown in weakness: it is raised in power: it is
sown a psychic body: it is raised a spiritual body. There is a psychic
body and there is a spiritual body. It depends wholly on the disciple
himself of what kind of flesh his next body shall consist of if
he reincarnates, whether he shall have a terrestrial or a celestial
body;
whether he shall share the glory of the sun or that of the moon or a
star.
If he is able to transcend the psychic world he will become a
quickening
spirit, for the "second man is the Lord from heaven."
It
is clear enough from all this that Paul used no false metaphor. The
psychic seed, which is the personality must die, as Jesus taught: "If
any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross
daily
and follow me. For whosoever will save his soul (psuche, personality)
will
lose it; but whosoever will lose his soul for my sake, the same shall
save
it." (Luke ix. 23, 24).
"I therefore, the prisoner
of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith
ye are called. With all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering,
forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep
the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace . . . till we all come in
the
unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God; unto a
perfect
man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."
(Ephesians
iv. 1, 2, 3, 13).
The Sweetness of Now
A hungry lion happened to see this man and began to chase him. The man
came to the edge of a cliff and fell into the abyss. On his way down,
he saw a branch and grabbed it. When he looked down, he saw another
lion waiting for him at the bottom of the ravine and when he looked up
he saw the first lion that had caused this predicament to start with.
At that very moment, two mice, one white and one black, started to gnaw
away at the very branch that was saving him from certain death and to
which he tenaciously clung. Just before the two mice were to completely
gnaw through the branch, the man saw a wild strawberry growing there.
Ah! How sweet it tasted!
The past and future are hungry lions that will devour you in
the present. The black and white duality of thought will gnaw away at,
and separate us from, the very Life to which we cling. Awareness of the
life of now is an indescribable sweetness.
Only now is real.
Previous
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